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United States National Archives Digitization Partners

A fantastic link was shared yesterday by instructor Claire Bettag, CG in her “NARA at Your Fingertips” talk to our group at the National Institute on Genealogical Research (NIGR), currently underway at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

The link she shared was to National Archives records digitized and made available in whole or in part on the websites of its digitization partners, Ancestry.com and Fold3.com. If researching from home, you will likely need a subscription to pull up the record, but the index should be available at no charge.

This long list of digitized publications can easily be sorted by clicking on any of the column headings. Or, search the page for a specific keyword using CTRL+ F on your keyboard. Once you’ve found a publication of interest, click on the title to be taken to the search page at the partner website. In this example, I have searched for M313, the War of 1812 Pension Application Files Index, and clicked that link to be taken to the search page on Ancestry.com.

War of 1812 Pension Application Files Index (1812-1815) at Ancestry.

Claire Bettag is one of my favorite speakers on topics relative to records held at the National Archives. I always come away with a valuable tidbit from one of her lectures.

It’s no secret. I love the subscription site Fold3.com, formerly Footnote.com, and have gratefully paid to be a subscriber to it since it launched in 2007. When Ancestry.com acquired the parent company of Fold3.com nearly two years ago, those of us who believe competition is good for the industry collectively held our breath to see what changes may come down the pipeline. Today, I can report one very positive outcome of that merger: the new “Save to Ancestry” button that now appears on Fold3.com.

I missed whatever announcement that may have been made about this new feature. However, when I pulled up a record in the viewer yesterday, the new green button containing the Ancestry.com logo was at the top right of the viewer.

Clicking this button allows a researcher to save the record image from Fold3.com to a tree on Ancestry. Simply select your pre-existing tree on Ancestry.com, and then select the person within the tree that you want to save the image to.

Once you see the message that you have successfully saved the image to the person’s “profile” on the Ancestry tree, you may then click in to view the image of the record.

The “Index to Selected Final Payment Vouchers, 1818-1864” (RG 217) is discussed in a 2008 article in Prologue by Claire Prechtel-Kluskens called “Follow the Money: Tracking Revolutionary War Army Pension Payments“. John King (1765-1855) is one of my Revolutionary War ancestors, and it is his index card that you see in the above screenshots.

200 years ago today, on 18 Jun 1812, what we now call “The War of 1812” began when the United States declared war on Great Britain. Explore the document that started it all at The National Archives Experience website.

2 Stat. 755 (1812) An Act declaring War between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America and their territories.

The War of 1812 has been referred to by historians as “The Forgotten War”. Now that the bicentennial is upon us, I doubt we’ll continue to use that phrase. There are some very interesting projects underway to chronicle the events of the war as they happened 200 years ago.

Follow the war online at 1812now or the Blog of 1812. Alternately, you can follow several different Twitter feeds where the war is being “live tweeted” or otherwise covered:

Find original documents about the War of 1812 online at Fold3.com. The collection is free to use in June 2012, and available via subscription thereafter.